Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico

Two: Genealogies of a Past

58 two Genealogies of a Past German political philosopher Karl Marx eloquently questioned the notion of historical transcendence by asking “What is a Negro slave?” His answer: “A man of the black race. . . . He only becomes a slave in certain relations.”1 Slaves (and consequently slavery) continually had to be made. Africans in the seventeenth century were made into slaves through specific relations of domination that marked them as distinct both from sixteenth-century arrivals and from others who experienced slavery in seventeenth-century New Spain. This chapter describes that historical process. In 1646, New Spain’s 35,089 enslaved Africans constituted the largest concentration of Africans in the urban New World. The African population in New Spain also represented the second largest assemblage of Africans in the Americas.2 As is evident in table 2.1, together with New Spain’s 116,529 blacks and mulattos , slave and free, the African population formed the largest black society in the Americas. Despite colonial Mexico’s rich historiography of ethnicity, a curious omission prevails. Though scholars acknowledge the size of the African population, its cultural significance remains largely unexamined. In light of the numerical ascendancy of Africans over Spaniards throughout the colonial period, this omission 1. Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1937), 29. 2. On the basis of the Harvard database The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (ed. David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert Klein [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999]), Africanist Joseph Miller states that there “were 15 successful crossings [to the Americas] from Central Africa in the 1590s, 30 in the 1600s, 47 in the 1610s, 27 in the 1620s, 21 in the 1630s and none in the 1640s.” During this period, Spanish American cities competed with Brazil as the principal recipients of enslaved Africans. “Central Africans,” Miller writes, “thus dominated the initial slave populations of the Americas at the beginning of the seventeenth century, with approximately equal numbers in Spanish cities and on sugar plantations in Brazil.” Joseph C. Miller, “Central Africa during the Era of the Slave Trade, c. 1490s–1850s,” in Central Africans and the Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda M. Heywood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 26–27. Genealogies of a Past   59 seems glaring. But when we acknowledge that during the same period slaves and free blacks constituted the majorities of the principle urban centers—the sites of Spanish power—the absence of scholarly attention becomes rather ominous. Basic social and cultural questions still need to be framed in relation to the African population. We know so little about the domestic arrangements of persons of African descent that even our knowledge about which questions we need to ask concerning gender, sexual, and family conventions among Africans remains provisional. Did a family structure exist among enslaved Africans?3 If so, what was its nature and on what social logic did it rest? How did the family structure Table 2.1. Population of New Spain by Region and Ethnic Group, 1646 Region1 Europeans Africans Indians Euro-Mestizo2 Afro-Mestizo3 Indo-Mestizo4 Mexico 8,000 19,441 600,000 94,544 43,373 43,190 Tlaxcala 2,700 5,534 250,000 17,404 17,381 16,841 Oaxaca 600 898 150,000 3,952 4,712 4,005 Michoacán 250 3,295 35,858 24,396 20,185 21,067 Nueva Galicia 1,450 5,180 41,378 19,456 13,778 13,854 Yucatán 750 497 150,053 7,676 15,770 8,603 Chiapas 80 244 42,318 1,140 1,330 1,482 Totals 13,830 35,089 1,269,607 168,568 116,529 109,042 Source: Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La población negra de México, 2nd ed. (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1972), 219.    1. Archdiocesan boundaries defined the regions employed in this census. 2. Denotes racially mixed persons who, for reasons of residency and public perception, were classified as Euro-Mestizos. Such individuals included, for example, the legitimate son or daughter of a Spanish-Indian union (a mestizo/a). Castizos and to a lesser extent light-complexioned moriscos were also defined as EuroMestizos . 3. Afro-Mestizos were usually racially mixed persons with either one or both parents of African descent. They and/or one of their parents were also partially of Spanish descent. The names most commonly used for such individuals were mulato or pardo. 4. These were...